3 . I never knew anyone who’d grown up in Jackson without being afraid of Mrs. Calloway our librarian. She ran Jackson’s Carnegie Library absolutely by herself. SILENCE in big black letters was on signs hung everywhere. If she thought you were dressed improperly, she sent you straight back home to change your clothes. I was willing;I would do anything to read.

My mother was not afraid of Mrs. Calloway. She wished me to have my own library card to check out books for myself, She took me in to introduce me. “Eudora is nine years old and has my permission to read any book she wants from the shelves, children or adults,” Mother said.

Mrs. Calloway made her own rules about books. You could not take back a book to the library on the same day you`d taken it out;it made no difference to her that you’d read every word in it and needed another to start. You could take out two books at a time and two only. So two by two, I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. I knew this was extreme happiness, knew it at the time.

My mother shared this feeling of mine. Now, I think of her as reading so much of the time while doing something else. I remember her reading a magazine while taking the part of the Wolf in a game of “Little Red Riding Hood” with my brother’s two daughters. She’d just look up at the right time, long enough to answer– in character –“The better to eat you with, my dear,” and go back to her place in the magazine article.

6 . As for Benjamin Franklin’s kite-and-key experiment, most people are aware of the version in which Franklin “discovered” electricity when lightning struck his kite. However, several details about this experiment are unknown, including when and where it happened. Some historians even doubt whether it took place.

In fact, electricity had already been used for centuries before Franklin’s experiment. Franklin lived from 1706 to 1790 when electricity was understood the interaction between two different fluids (流体), which Franklin later referred to as “plus” and “minus”.

It was unknown before Franklin’s experiment whether lightning was electrical, though some scientists, including Franklin, had guessed just that. Franklin was particularly interested in this because lightning strikes had caused disastrous fires where houses were made of wood. Actually, by creating a lightning rod (避雷针), Franklin helped to protect wooden buildings from being struck by lightning.

A few publications reported the experiment. In 1771 Franklin referred to the experiment in his autobiography, and other colleagues also wrote about it. Notably, the experiment appeared in “History and Present Status of Electricity” by Joseph Priestley. Priestley heard about the kite and key experiment from Franklin himself around 15 years after the fact, and in his book, he wrote it occurred in June 1752.

However, in a book by Tom Tucker, he noted Franklin’s description of his experiment was phrased in the future conditional tense: “As soon as any of the Thunder Clouds come over the Kite, the pointed Wire will draw the Electric Fire from them...” Franklin could have simply been saying that the experiment could, in theory, be performed. Given that his statement has a few missing details — Franklin didn’t list a date, time or location, for example it’s possible that Franklin did not perform the experiment himself.

However, some historians remain unconvinced that the experiment wasn’t carried out. Franklin experts, such as biographer Carl Van Doren, also point to the fact that Priestley specified the month in which Franklin performed his experiment, suggesting that Franklin must have given him precise details directly.

7 . After analyzing 14.5 billion words used in daily news coverage in 2021, The Oxford English Dictionary has chosen “vax” as the Word of the Year.

Oxford Languages, the publisher of the dictionary, reported that “Vax”, the shortened term for “vaccine”, has injected itself into the bloodstream of the English language, and is a catchy and punchy word for 2021.

A contributing factor to its rise in 2021 — aside from its obvious relation to the COVID vaccine drive — is its adaptability, according to Fiona McPherson, a senior editor of The Oxford English Dictionary. It can mean either vaccine or vaccination as a noun and vaccinate as a verb, and it is the root of many other phrases such as “vax cards”, “vax passports”, and “getting vaxxied”. The word has also been changed into other inventive words like vaxxie, a selfie taken during or immediately before or after one’s vaccination. “It has made the most striking impact,” said Fiona MePherson.

Vax and vaxx are both accepted spellings, but the form with one x is more common. It was first recorded in English in 1799, while its derivatives (衍生词) “vaccinate” and “vaccination” both first appeared in 1800. All of these words ultimately came from the Latin word “vacca”, which means “cow”. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, this is due to English physician and scientist Edward Jenner’s pioneering work on vaccination against smallpox in the late 1790s and early 1800s.

“The word’s highest frequency in usage caught our attention first. Then we ran the analysis and a story started to emerge, revealing how ‘vax’ sat at the centre of our preoccupations this year,” Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, said in an interview. “No word better captures the atmosphere of the year than ‘vax’”.

10 . A vast majority of people usually argue that cycling can make a significant contribution to our world. In reality, there is a gap between desired and actual numbers. In Germany, for instance, only 20% of the everyday short-distance trips are covered by bicycle. When enquiring about the causes, researchers found one point repeatedly tops the list: the perceived or potential risk on the bike routes used. Increasing the share of cycling trips thus depends crucially on well-developed bike paths.

However, designing efficient bike path networks is a complex task that involves balancing a variety of limitations while meeting overall demand. In addition, many districts are confronted with a shortage of funds available for improving the infrastructure. Researchers propose a new approach to generating efficient bike path networks. This considers demand distribution and the route option of cyclists based on preferences for secure outings. Typically, minimizing the travel distance is far from the solely goal. Aspects such as attractiveness of a route are also taken into account.